Tennis is a better game for having had Clijsters

Kim Clijsters’ exit from pro tennis was quick and efficient, much like her game.

When she suffered another injury a few weeks ago, in what had become an agonizing series of them, she departed from her plan of retiring after playing the rest of the majors this year. Instead, she simply departed.

The French Open began Sunday and she probably was home in Belgium. Like Lindsay Davenport after her recent retirement, Clijsters is sighing in relief these days. She is engaged to basketball player Brian Lynch, an American playing professionally in Belgium, and has always said her future would be more family than finals.

Davenport waited longer in her career to identify the same priority, but now that she has, she proudly proclaims her new life status as “housewife.”

Both reached No. 1 in the world several times. Had they held ratings for the category of “nice person,” they each would have been No. 1 longer.

Clijsters is gone now but should not be forgotten.

The first loss for tennis fans will be at Paris, where she made it to the final twice and always was a contender. She played at Roland Garros only six times but made it to the final in her second try, at age 18. And it wasn’t just any final. Four times, she was within two points of winning the match and eventually, playing in a 12-10 third set that remains the longest in French Open women’s competition, she fell to Jennifer Capriati.

Grass was not her best surface, but she got to two semifinals at Wimbledon. She made the semifinals four times at the Australian Open and the final once.

But she had her proudest moment at the 2005 U.S. Open, where she beat Mary Pierce in the final.

She won more than $15 million on tour, along with 34 singles titles, 11 doubles titles and two Grand Slam doubles titles, besides her U.S. Open in singles. She even made it to a Grand Slam mixed doubles final in 2000, playing with then-boyfriend Lleyton Hewitt.

She’s still a young woman -- she’ll turn 24 on June 8 -- but this is not a boxing retirement.

For 10 years, including fast success in qualifiers and satellite events the first two, she ran the baseline with grace and power. She played fast, ignored tour politics and on-court gamesmanship and won and lost with similar poise and dignity.

But nothing tells the story of Clijsters the person and why she will be missed quite like the night of Aug. 3, at last year’s tournament in La Costa.

On that Wednesday night of the weeklong Acura Classic, a fundraiser for the Scripps Pollster Breast Care Center was held. This one had the usual raffles and auctions, but with a twist. The top prize would be paraded at the dinner, then auctioned off at center court after the first match of the night.

Clijsters, one of only a few players who showed up for the dinner, spotted the prize, a black Lab puppy, and left her table to pet him. Her love for dogs is widely known. She suffered one of her injuries, in fact, when she was playing with her own dog and tripped over him.

Clijsters carried the puppy around, showing him to others and, along the way, ran into Jacque Morgan of Cardiff, a dental hygienist, single mother of a 20-year-old son and a tennis fan and player.

“I go to the La Costa tournament every year,” Morgan said recently, “and I always try to go to the charity dinner too.”

Morgan said that she and Clijsters talked for a while about their love for dogs and Clijsters asked if she was going to bid on the black Lab puppy.

“I told her no, that the bidding was going to start at something like $2,000, and I couldn’t afford that,” Morgan said. “Then she asked me my name, where my seat was.”

Morgan didn’t think much about it, even once the bidding began on center court. Former tennis star Pam Shriver served as auctioneer, and it quickly became evident that there were two people in the crowd willing to go high to get the puppy.

When the bidding stopped at $11,000, Clijsters walked out of the crowd, picked up the puppy, walked to the microphone and asked if a Jacque Morgan would come down from her seat in the stands.

“When I saw her down there,” Morgan said, “I was wondering how she was going to travel with a dog, and then, all of sudden, she was calling my name. I couldn’t believe it.”

Morgan said that when she got down to the court Clijsters told her the dog was hers. She just wanted to be sure he would go to someone who would take good care of him.

“I took him home that night,” Morgan said. “Kim didn’t know it, but I had lost a female black Lab about a year and a half before -- she got sick at age 9 -- and I still had enough things for a dog that I was able to take him right home that night.”

Four days later, Morgan went back to see Clijsters and gambled that the best time for a visit would be after her final against Maria Sharapova. Clijsters lost, 7-5, 7-5, but Morgan went to see her, anyway.

“She was still so nice to me, even after losing,” Morgan said.

Morgan named the dog after her favorite tennis player, and she reports that K.C. has papers that show he is a purebred with champion lineage.

That seems only right.

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at [email protected]. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.